“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation. You were (pause) each present at the beginning of the world, then, though you may be present in the world now in a somewhat different fashion.

For some time, in your terms, the sleepwalkers remained more or less at that level of activity, and for many centuries they used the surface of the earth as a kind of background for other activity.Their real life was what you would now call the dreaming one. They worked mentally while asleep, constructing in their individual minds and in their joint mental endeavors (long pause) all of the dazzling images that would later become a mental reservoir from which men could draw. In that multidimensional array, consciousness mentally learned to form itself into EE units, atoms and molecules, electrons and chromosomes. It mentally formed the patterns through which all physical life could flow. The world then came into physical existence. Those units of consciousness are indestructible and vitalized, regardless of the forms they take, and while men’s forms were dream images, consciousness spun forms into physical material.

You read your own consciousness now in a kind of vertical fashion, identifying only with certain portions of it, and it seems to you that any other organization of perception, any other recognition of identity, would quite necessarily negate your own or render it inoperable. In the beginning of the world there were numberless groupings, however, and affiliations of consciousness, many other organizations of identity that were recognized, as well as the kind of psychological orientation you have now—but [your] kind of orientation was not the paramount one. While, generally speaking, earth’s species existed from the beginning in the forms by which you now know them, consciousness of species was quite different, and all species were much more intimately related through various kinds of identification that have since gone into the underground of awareness.

(9:05.) Initially, then, the world was a dream, and what you think of as waking consciousness was the dreaming consciousness. In that regard the earth’s entire environment was built mentally, atom by conscious atom—each atom, again, being initially formed by units of consciousness. I said that these units could operate as entities, and as forces, so we are not speaking of a mental mechanics but of entities in the true meaning of the word: entities of unimaginable creative and psychic properties, purposeful fragments propelled from the infinite mind as that mind was filled with the inspiration that gave light to the world. Those entities, in your terms so ancient, left fragments of themselves in trance (underlined), so to speak, that form the rocks and hills, the mountains, the air and the water, and all of the elements that exist on the face of the earth.

This tale, I admit, is far more difficult to understand than a simple story of God’s creation of the world, or its actual production in a meaningless universe through the slippery hands of chance—and yet my story is more magnificent because elements of its truth will find resonance in the minds and hearts of those open enough to listen. For men’s minds themselves are alive with the desire to read properly, and they are aware of their own vast heritage. It is not simply that man has a soul that is somehow blessed while the rest of him is not, but that in those terms everything [he knows], regardless of size or degree, is made of “soul stuff.” Each portion has its own identity and validity—and no portion is ever annihilated or destroyed. The form may change.

(All with a rolling intensity:) I must of necessity tell this story in serial terms, but the world and all of its creatures actually come together like some spontaneously composed, ever-playing musical composition in which the notes themselves are alive and play themselves, so that the musicians and the notes are one and the same, the purpose and the performance being one, with each note played continuing to strike all of its own probable versions, forming all of its own probable compositions while at the same time taking part in all of the themes, melodies, and notes of the other compositions—so that each note, striking, defines itself, and yet also exists by virtue of its position in the composition as a whole.

In a way, your world follows its own theme in creativity’s composition. You want to know where you came into the musical production, so to speak. (Pause.) I use a musical analogy here, if a simple one, to point out that we are also dealing with frequencies of perception. You are tuned into earth’s orchestration [you might say], and your perception of time is simply the result of habits—habits of perception that you had to learn in the beginning of the world. And you learned those habits as your physical senses gradually became more alert and specific.

(9:47.) You “timed” yourselves—but greater perceptions always appeared in the background of your consciousnesses and in the dream state. It is the great activity of the dream state that allows you, as psychological and physical creatures, to recognize and inhabit the world that you know (louder).

(9:52 P.M. Jane said she’d been pretty far out during the session—then added later while we talked that she was picking up from Seth information on the beginning of our own world, species and civilizations that he intended to give in the next session. Seth, then, was capable of coming through with that material right now. Only Jane’s and my own conventions of time and habit, even concerning a phenomenon as unusual as the sessions, stopped him from doing so. Inevitably, the session Jane delivers for Seth next Monday evening will be somewhat different from the one she could produce tonight. There are many interesting implications here.)

1. My dream represented a reaffirmation of a stand I’d taken early in this life—one that perhaps I’d felt since birth. Very simply: I dreamed that I was a youth, and that even though there was snow on the ground I’d been given the task of taking care of a beautiful young tree growing in a large field next to the Butts family home in Sayre, Pennsylvania. (Sayre is only 18 miles from Elmira, New York, where Jane and I live now.) Even though it was wintertime, the tree carried a sparse cover of leaves. Nearby in the dream were old industrial buildings, in which I became lost—but I found my way out of them and returned to the tree. My interpretation is that I saw the tree as the tree of life even then, and that I’d chosen to remain close to the world of nature and art instead of immersing myself in the safer industrial one. Jane was inspired by the dream to write a series of excellent short poems about it today.